Fig. 1: screenshot showing a user on shitposter.club (a GNU Social instance) claiming that they are anti-Nazi (much as the instance's banner claims it is a "safe space"), both of which seem very unlikely to me given that they don't even have a Code of Conduct in evidence and the prior administration of TootCat blocked them

[ reposted from G+, with minor adaptations ]

I didn't have permission to comment on the original post, but was able to re-share it. Since G+ will be going away at some point, though, I'm making a practice of fully re-posting anything significant that I post there. So...

I always think it's really funny when I'm active in a community that is pronounced "dead" or "a ghost town". This happened multiple times with both G+ and Mastodon. It's finally soon to become a reality with G+, but Mastodon membership has only been increasing as people grow disgusted with centralized for-profit social networks (mainly Twitter and Facebook).

To confirm what @Dr. Edward Morbius said -- instance-blocking is indeed a feature, and a very necessary one; some instances are seemingly created largely as a haven for abusive ideologies like Nazism and capitalism (often under the fallacious banner of "free speech"[3]), and they are a reliable source of disinformation and abuse, so we block them when we can identify them[4].

The other blocking features he cites are also correct, as are all the other details he has observed, to the best of my knowledge.

Despite this, +Uche Eke's observation about the apparent inadequacy of moderation features is also correct. While moderation is orders of magnitude better than on the for-profit networks, where all they really care about is quantity, it has been clear to me from the time I joined in May 2017 that more was needed.

(I have detailed ideas on that front; have hobby-horse, will ramble.)

Footnotes

...and growing; it was under 1000 when I took over the joint in January.First list element

Back in the day, it was routine to see some "pundit" declaring that G+ was a ghost-town, or populated only with Google employees. And the useful reflex was "follow the money": G+ could have been a serious challenger to Facebook, which would impact Fb's stock price and ad revenue. (Same thing with the attacks on the Android platform - Apple surrogates and paid trolls doing the dirty work). So every time I see stuff like this, I just assume that's what's going on.

Honestly, this is nothing new. Coverage of Decentralized Libre social networking platforms has always been poorly-researched, with a largely dismissive emphasis towards the effort. Many people writing about projects like Diaspora or Mastodon barely even put in any effort to try the platform out for more than a week.